By David Nemec

In this extraordinary and powerfully wrenching novel, an adolescent boy searches for a path out of a seemingly inescapable "darkness" after the loss of his father in a time and place full of contradictions.

Seen through the eyes of Ben Farkas, a child of first generation parents, and set against the backdrop of a small Midwestern suburban town in the mid-1950s, Remember Me To My Father takes us through what will prove to be the most difficult and turbulent years of Ben's life. For him, the twelve months between the Cleveland Brown's devastating last-minute defeat in the 1953 NFL title game and the final day of 1954 are a period of anguish, confusion, punishment, despair, and finally triumph.

At the outset of his turbulent year, Ben's concerns are typical of most young people. He longs for recognition and fears that he has fallen behind his teammates and classmates in the race to achieve athletic success, sexual prowess and, above all, an optimistic sense of himself and his future. Following his father's tragic death, however, Ben feels himself becoming increasingly isolated and distant. In the world he tries to create without his father, he withdraws into baseball as "the only thing of consequence." The private ritual of his absorption in the game that he calls Project Bible comes to be the only thing that can bring escape from the deepening sense of alienation he is experiencing.

By Labor Day night, on the eve of the beginning of his senior year of high school, Ben is acutely aware that he is in danger of slipping into a bottomless darkness. Desperate for a way back, he invades the house of Lisa Sterling, the beautiful wife of a man he has grown to believe epitomizes everything he is not. Upon finding Lisa home alone, he steals into her room after she turns out the light and prepares for bed. The novel culminates when the discoveries Ben makes with Lisa allow him at last to emerge from his personal darkness and forge a hard-won peace with himself.

Remember Me to My Father is profoundly honest in its evocation of the pain and conflicting passions that besiege the youth of both sexes and superb in its depiction of the capricious social and moral climate of the 1950s.  Exceptional writing, a deep sense of compassion for its protagonist, and a rare depth of insight combine to make it a masterful historical portrait of small-town life a half centruy ago and a novel in the classical tradition of Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Hemingway.

  READERS PRAISE THIS BOOK: 

Growing up in Ohio, Ben in Columbus, Ohio
Fantastic novel! I read it once quickly and then had to reread it to savor the exquisite subtleties. It caught the trials and tribulations of a boy growing up in the mid-1950s perfectly. Ben's story brought back the poignancy of my high school years all too clearly: the yearning for those cute coeds that I was too painfully shy to talk to, much less ask for a date, and that secret longing for a mysterious older woman of the world who would initiate me into the wonders of manhood. Well done.

Gutsy and passionate, by a reader Nemec is one the most unappreciated fiction writers we have. Every one of his books is gutsy and passionate and full of strange twists. This book combines accurate, unsentimental pictures of growing up in the 50's in tight concentric circles with the drama and risk of breaking out of those circles into manhood.